Office Live Workspace to Bow to Office Web Apps, SkyDrive

Late last week, Microsoft began alerting customers of its Office Live Workspace service that they will soon see their online document repositories merged into Windows Live SkyDrive, which provides 25GB of storage space, for free, and offers the ability to edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote documents from the web via Office Web Apps (OWA). Previously, Microsoft had offered little in the way of information about what would happen to Office Live Workspace once SkyDrive offered OWA integration.

"Your Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta account is about to become even better," a message to Office Live Workspace subscribers reads. "You already know it's a great way to store and share documents, and soon it will come together with Windows Live SkyDrive to become a great way to view, create, and edit documents from virtually anywhere."

Customers who have Office Live Workspace accounts will be migrated to SkyDrive and OWA over time, Microsoft says. According to a document provided by the company, this migration will occur "in the coming months," and customers will be notified when the migration occurs. The migration will be an opt-in process at first, though it's expected that all Workspace users will eventually have to upgrade.

Microsoft also maintains a separate Office Live Small Business service, which provides domain hosting and other services of interest to small businesses. Office Live Small Business isn't affected by the release of SkyDrive with OWA, and access to this service won't be changing.